Liberties;The Dream Machine

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 14, 1996

WASHINGTON—
It's a familiar story. The Dream becomes a Nightmare. Television logos shifted seamlessly from the Jessica Dubroff Adventure to the Jessica Dubroff Tragedy. Newspaper headlines went from a little girl with a big dream to the death of a little girl and her big dream.

We learn early on, in this business, how to gussy up macabre curiosity as public service.

Ted Koppel interviewed a child psychologist on the issue of parental pressure. Forrest Sawyer asked David Hinson of the F.A.A. about his review of regulations on kids' manipulating airplane controls. "Age is not an issue here," he replied.

Larry King asked 9-year-old aviator Killian Moss about whether Jessica's accident made him fearful of flying. "Um," Killian replied, "it just made me stop and think, like, no more flying through bad weather."

The solemn concern about nutty juvenile stunts comes too late. Before the trip, everyone treated a dangerous gimmick as cute. Jessica was hyped as a 55-pound Amelia Earhart, in her brown leather jacket and "Women Fly" cap, with a red booster seat to help her see over the instrument panel and three-inch aluminum extensions on the rudder pedals.

"You are actually going to take off, fly the plane the whole way, and do all the landings as well?" Forrest Sawyer asked on ABC.

"Yes," she said.

She and her father told reporters it was his idea to have his daughter fly 6,900 miles in eight days. "Out of the blue," he said, "it occurred to me that Jessica could do this."

Why didn't we all just get up and begin screaming? THIS IS CRAZY!!!

At 7, you should be taking your first trip around the block on your bike. You should not be expected to have the maturity to tell your immature father and miscalculating flight instructor that the weather looks too icky to take off. Especially when your father is in a rush to arrive in Massachusetts and make NBC's "Today Show."

No, we should never have treated the lovely little girl trying to break a silly record as a heroine. And, though it may be hard to draw the line in a society where people will say and do anything to get on TV, we never should have rewarded Lloyd Dubroff for using his daughter to quench his own thirst for celebrity. This was an inhuman interest story.

It's heartbreaking to watch the tape made just before the fatal Cheyenne takeoff, as Jessica tries to answer a TV reporter's chirpy questions, even as she distractedly looks back at her small plane being pelted by hail and sleet.

People gripe about too much regulation. But there's no minimum age to learn to fly? A child may be called a passenger and there may be a flight instructor with dual controls, but so what? And there's no rule that small planes can't take off in hail and wind shear?

The Guinness Book of Records, not wanting to encourage pushy parents, no longer recognizes the "youngest pilot" category. But who needs Guinness when you've got the networks falling all over themselves?

It is creepy to see the film of Jessica in the cockpit, which her father shot from the back seat with a camera provided by ABC News.

Lloyd Dubroff: What would you do, Jess, if the engine quit right now?

Jessica: I don't know.

A video camera was found in the wreckage.

After the crash, F.A.A. officials sounded disturbingly like N.R.A. and cigarette lobbyists: Any controls would be bad. Young customers are good. This is a free country. "There was ridiculous exploitation of her by the media and her family," said one F.A.A. official, speaking privately. "But we shouldn't have a reaction to that, so that nobody below the age of 15 will ever be able to feel the joy of flight."

The aftermath was surreal. Befitting the age of Oprah, when Jessica's mother was comforted by a pilot who saw the crash and knew that Jessica died too quickly to suffer, the entire exchange was done on camera.

Lisa Blair Hathaway, the mother and "spiritual healer" who raised Jessica in New Age freedom, said her daughter had died "in a state of joy": "She had the room to be, she had the room to choose, she had the room to have her life." Perhaps too much room? Ms. Hathaway urged the F.A.A. to let children fly.